


Faceless Menace

by dreamiflame



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Dark Magic, Gen, Origin Story, ToT: Extra Treat, ToT: Monster Mash, ToT: Trick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-27 22:06:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8418907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/pseuds/dreamiflame
Summary: A cursed mask comes into being.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BigStripeyLie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BigStripeyLie/gifts).



> Happy Halloween, BigStripeyLie! I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Thanks to my poor overworked beta.

The mask was carved of obsidian, inlaid with gold and precious stones. Careful taps of the hammer etched in sacred and terrible symbols.

The demon sat in the circle, what passed for its head resting on what passed for its hand, pseudo elbow propped on pseudo knee. It blinked eyes of flame in a skeleton face and stared at the artisan carving the mask.

“I trust there’s a reason I’m stuck here while you make your pet create a mask for you?” it said.

“Whispers in the dark,” the wizard replied, and went back to silently moving his lips as he watched the mask take form.

Even with the demon’s admiration of the mask, which was a thing of beauty, unfinished as it was, the circle was boring.

“You ought to dismiss me and summon me again when you actually need me,” it said, and yawned until the human jawbone it wore rested against the spinal column below it.

Human magic was dull, dim and powerless. The only thing this particular wizard was good at was binding circles. Out of habit, the demon tapped its toe bones against the bottom edge of the circle, seeking a break.

There wasn’t one. There never was.

A tug at the essence of the demon, and it lifted its skull from its hand. “I have another call,” it said.

The wizard turned to the circle with a smug, evil smile just as the demon recognized the last symbol being carved on the mask. Its name. Its benighted damnable name.

“You’re not going to have any other calls ever again,” said the wizard, as the demon howled. Its skeleton appearance dissolved as the symbols of its name forced it into the mask.

The empty eyes of the mask glowed fire bright for a moment. The artisan cried out and recoiled from the work table.

“Finish it!” the wizard thundered. “Finish it, or you damn us both!”

With a whimper, the artisan leaned back over the mask, every inch of him but his hands trembling as he finished incising the last lines. The eye holes spat sparks, then went dark. Empty, just holes in a mask.

The artisan put down his tools and shuddered. “Good, sir?”

“Excellent,” said the wizard, and drew the black knife across the artisan's throat, quenching the mask in its maker’s blood. The mask seemed to absorb the blood on contact, and the wizard smiled at the artisan clutched at his throat and gasped.

“You did a perfect job,” the wizard said, and waited until all the blood was gone and the corpse had stopped twitching before he reached for the mask.

He set it against his smirking face, feeling the power within the glass. “Now I will smite my enemies, and drag down all those who dared to scorn me!”

“I don’t think so,” said the voice of the demon trapped in the mask, and the wizard died screaming, his life force and the pathetic scraps of power he held sucked from him as though he was nothing more than a juicy berry.

*

Everyone who touched the mask suffered the same fate: horrible death, their corpses found looking like dried husks. Finally a champion had the bright idea of wearing gloves.

Ever so cautiously, he lifted the mask in his gloved hands and put it into a lead box. The lead box was welded shut, and placed in an iron box, also sealed.

The iron box was taken to a far, hidden place, and put in a roughly carved stone chest deep within a labyrinth lost beneath the earth. Of the five men who went in to bury the box, only one returned. He would never speak of what he saw.

*

They say for the power hungry or foolhardy, the mask still waits in its triple chests, there for the taking.

If you can control it. Or it chooses to control you.


End file.
